Philip Caputo, who wrote a best-selling and brutally honest memoir about his time as a Marine fighting in the Vietnam War and later won a Pulitzer Prize while working as a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, died Thursday at his home in Norwalk, Conn.
Mr. Caputo, 84, died of cancer, his son, Marc Caputo, said in a post on Facebook.
“A Rumor of War,” published in 1977, sold more than 1.5 million copies, was translated into 15 languages and has often been required reading for high school students to learn about the Vietnam War.
“You smell the rain forest, the sweat, the burning villages, the rank fear, the running blood, the twisted morality, the decomposing bodies, the animal in us all,” a reviewer for the Chicago Sun-Times wrote of “A Rumor of War,” Mr. Caputo’s best-known book.
In it, he detailed what he saw and experienced right down to the humps boots make in body bags. He also described how he nearly faced a court-martial after two men under his command killed two civilians they suspected were Vietcong. Mr. Caputo took responsibility for their deaths.
In the prologue, he said the memoir was “simply a story about war, about the things men do in war and the things war does to them.”
Looking back on those words in a 2017 piece published on the website Literary Hub, he wrote: “To expand on that thought a bit — the things men do in war is often a measure of the things it has done to them.”
Mr. Caputo grew up in Westchester, attended Fenwick High School and, in 1964, graduated from Loyola University.
After being honorably discharged from the military, he got a job at the Chicago Tribune, where he was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for reporting on election fraud.
In his 1991 memoir “Means of Escape,” he wrote: “In the late Sixties, the Tribune’s city room was still a place of noise and dirt and magic, as cavernous and exciting as a busy railroad station . . .I could feel the voltage in the air the minute I stepped inside, smelled it in the odors of ink and pot-paste and smoke from pipes, cigarettes, cigars. . . . The whole building . . . seemed alive, and I knew, not in my mind but in my blood and marrow, this is it, this is where I belong.”
He also worked as a foreign correspondent for the Tribune and other publications, writing from all over the world, including Israel, Lebanon, Cyprus, Eritrea, Afghanistan and Sudan.
He returned to Vietnam as a journalist and covered the fall of Saigon in 1975, once again finding himself in the midst of violence, this time as he hurried to evacuate the city.
“The shells kept coming down the road, seeming to chase our Jeep, an experience I can only liken to driving through a terrible thunderstorm with aimed lightning bolts striking all around you,” he wrote in “Means of Escape.”
“I pulled out a cigarette, but could not hold it or my lighter. No slight trembling either, but a palsy. . . . My nerves were in rebellion against my will. . . . Courage, like coal or oil, was a finite resource. Draw down your reserves often enough, and you’d probably end up too scared to walk out your front door.”
That same year, he was wounded in the legs by gunfire while reporting on the Lebanese civil war.
Following “A Rumor of War,” Mr. Caputo found continued success as an author, writing 12 novels, four works of nonfiction and three memoirs in all.
His 2002 book “Ghosts of Tsavo” tells the story of his journey to Kenya to investigate the notorious 1898 man-eating lions that killed dozens of railroad workers. The taxidermied bodies of the lions are on display at the Field Museum.
His 2013 book “The Longest Road” chronicled a four-month, 17,000-mile road trip — pulling an Airstream trailer — from Key West, Fla., to Deadhorse, Alaska, that he took with his wife and two dogs.
Mr. Caputo is survived by his wife Leslie Ware, sons Geoffrey and Marc and three grandchildren.